Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Using a Tour Striker Pro & Vintage Blade 2-iron

About a week ago, I had a reader ask me what should the purchase to help with their range practice, the Tour Striker Pro 7-iron or an old blade 2-iron.

I am a fan of both ideas, I just think that golfers need to understand what will help improve what parts of their game.

The Tour Striker Pro 7-iron was created by friend of the blog, Martin Chuck. The idea is to ‘shave off’ the bottom part of the club and that forces the golfer to get some forward shaft lean at impact in order for them to hit the ball properly. I’ve hit both the regular Tour Striker and the Tour Striker pro. I can hit the regular Tour Striker with relative ease, but the Tour Striker Pro really demands some precision.

The idea behind practicing with a blade 2-iron came from John Erickson (www.advancedballstriking.com). The theory is that the old blade 2-irons had very little offset, small heads and no bounce. Thus, practicing with an iron that is this difficult to hit will help with your timing and if you can hit a blade 2-iron well, you can certainly hit a 7-iron or a PW well.

I think the Tour Striker Pro is beneficial to golfers who flip at impact and have troubles compressing the ball and getting a lower ball flight on a well struck shot. The total cost for one is about $99. I do believe one would benefit from MOI fitting and matching a Tour Striker Pro. That’s actually rather affordable to do, you just need a clubfitter who can MOI fit and match clubs.

With the vintage blade 2-iron models, I believe that this helps more with the longer clubs, even the driver and fairway woods. It also helps with golfers who have too steep of an attack angle angle and in general, the mechanics required to hit a higher trajectory shot.

I carry a 1976 blade Hogan Apex 2-iron that is 39.5 inches long and I had the MOI match the rest of my irons at 2,725 kg/cm^2. I got the iron head at www.theironfinder.com. Overall, it cost me about $20 for the head, another $16 for the shaft (Dynamic Gold XP) and $5 for the shaft. However, I do believe that it’s more important to MOI fit and match the 2-iron than the Tour Striker pro given the difference in length and loft. When the MOI is off on longer clubs, you really start to notice it more than the shorter, higher lofted irons.

I believe just about anybody can benefit from both the Tour Striker Pro and an old vintage blade 2-iron. But, I would probably recommend to most amateurs to start off with the Tour Striker Pro first to help understand the concepts of hitting down on the ball and making ball first contact.

1 comment:

I know this an old post, but my Google search this morning yielded this post at the top. 3Jack, hopefully you will chime in on this......

At the range yesterday, 2 large buckets down range by the time I was through. Long story short, I could not hit my irons to save my life! I have hit them well in the past (not fitted), but after a back injury this winter, I am coming back slowly. BUT, there was one iron that I could NOT mishit, the Tour Striker 8 iron (not the Pro). EVERY TIME I hit this club, it was a beautiful high 2-3 yard draw.

I could switch between any given iron and the Tour Striker, and I can count on one hand the number of bad shots with the Tour Striker. And with my irons, I hit every kind of shot imaginable... thin, fat, pulled, 3 foot off the ground. No height or distance. But the TS was amazing.

OK, so I lied, it was kind of a long story. My thought was, could it be that the MOI of the Tour Striker is better suited to me than my Cobra AMP irons? I started thinking last night that I should find a builder that could check the MOI of the TS, and compare that to my irons. If there is a significant difference, would it make sense to either rebuild or build a new set to match the MOI of the Tour Striker? Or at the very lest, build a single club to test?